Funeral for Kurdish activist Mehmet Aksoy who lived in Luton

The funeral for Kurdish filmmaker Mehmet Aksoy – who was killed by ISIS after travelling to Syria – will be held this week.

Funeral services for Mr Aksoy, 32, will be held in London on Friday, November 10, 2017 at the Kurdish Community Centre beginning at 09:30.

Mr Aksoy, whose parents run an off-licence in Luton, was a long-time activist and cherished leader of the Kurdish community in the UK.

He went to Syria in June 2017 to document the resistance and was killed in an ambush by ISIS who stormed a compound just outside of Raqqa on Tuesday, September 26. His body was returned to the UK a month later.

A spokesman for The Kurdish People’s Assembly said: “The Kurdish people have struggled relentlessly for the world to understand their battle for a democratic, ecological, multi-ethnic, and gender-equal society, which they have been fighting to build in the Middle East. Mehmet Aksoy was a leader in this self-determination effort, spearheading the Kurdish Solidarity movement in the U.K. and beyond, as editor of KurdishQuestion.com, a website devoted to news, features and commentary about the Kurdish liberation movement.”

Aksoy was born in 1985 to a Kurdish family living in Istanbul. His family migrated to London when he was four years old and moved to Luton several years ago. Aksoy became involved in the Kurdish Community Centre in London as a teen.

The official funeral ceremony for Mehmet Aksoy is to take place at the Kurdish Community Centre (11 Portland Gardens, London, N4 1HU) on Friday, November 10, at 9.30am with speeches from Aksoy’s family members and community representatives.

The official ceremony will continue at 11.30am with a three-mile march from the community centre to Highgate Cemetery (Swain’s Lane, Highgate, London N6 6PJ) for the burial to commence at 1pm.

More than 2000 people attended a commemoration for Aksoy on Sunday, October 1.